Can there ever be too many Christmas decorations? A home offers ample opportunity for dressing it up for the holidays, and we’ve found both traditional and unconventional Christmas decorations highlighted in The British Newspaper Archive. Which would you use in your own home? Traditional decorations Unconventional decorations Jazz up your Christmas decorations with some unconventional touches. The Tatler highlighted a Christmas mobile in their 8 November 1957 issue: ‘Snow crystals airily floating in space or gaily coloured glass Christmas tree balls …
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We are now counting down the days until Christmas, and there are only a few days of shopping left. Many of us are looking for inspiration for that perfect gift. The newspapers found in The British Newspaper Archive can provide a number of gift-giving guides. We can see an increase in Christmas advertising and gift guides from the late 18th century as mass consumerism became a trend of Christmas. Before the days of social media, Pinterest, and Amazon wish lists, …
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We’re finishing the year with a bang, this week we reached twenty-three million pages in The Archive, having added 285,684 pages in the past two weeks. This week we’ve added more pages to our Trinity Mirror collection, with significant additions to The Coventry Evening Telegraph and The Coventry Herald. We hope sports fans will enjoy our additions to Sports Argus which now runs to 1979 and includes coverage of the 1966 FIFA World Cup Final. We continue to add to …
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Register today! It is that time of the year. The trees have been decorated, the lights strung up around the windows, nativity scenes assembled, and stockings hung (by the chimney with care). It also means that it is time to start planning your Christmas dinner. For many of us, that means making travel arrangements, but for the hosts of these pivotal dinners, it means creating an efficient plan, ordering the turkey, picking the best vegetables, and food preparation. To help you …
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During this Christmas season, we’ve had the pleasure of finding some phenomenal images of outdoor street decorations from years past. These large lanterns can be seen hanging in the image below, in the lower-righthand corner.
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It’s 1841 and Josiah Mister is on trial in Shrewsbury for attempted murder – committed at the Angel Inn in Ludlow. The victim was William Mackreth, a trader from Bristol who was in the town for the summer fair. In the early hours of the morning, he was brutally attacked by someone who’d been hiding under his bed. He managed to fight him off and his assailant escaped; a trail of blood led to Josiah’s room and he was arrested. But did …
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We’re happy to bring you word of the latest additions to The British Newspaper Archive. Three new titles have joined the site along with updates to ten existing titles. Our new titles are from Jedburgh, Roxburghshire, Scotland; Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England; and Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, England: Jedburgh Gazette, Wisbech Standard, and Hunts Post, respectively. You can learn more about each of the titles we have added to this week by clicking on their names below. On each paper’s title page, you can learn more …
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We have come to the end of the year and for the month of December we are looking across the month at historic events that occurred during the month including the death of a famous musician, an explorer’s achievement, the first woman in Parliament, and the coronation of Napoleon. We do not claim that these are all the noteworthy historical events in December. If you know of any significant ‘December’ events that you have found in The Archive share them …
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One of the features of The British Newspaper Archive is the OCR editing tool. This allows every user to contribute to the improvement of The Archive. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition– the process we use to transform millions of digitised images into searchable text. The computer takes an image of the page and then turns each line into text. However, as many of us have encountered, the text is not always correct and needs improvement. As a group, we …
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During the First World War (1914-1918), the role of women in Britain was massively altered and the women’s sphere was enlarged in every direction. Some historians mark the First World War as a watershed moment in women’s history when women were looked at less as fragile creatures and more as robust figures. A single blog post is not enough to explore all the contributions of women during the Great War, but we have combed through The British Newspaper Archive and …